Gamesploitation

Contents

In any massively multiplayer online game, it's a long, hard fight from newbiedom to level awesome. But some players think that's a game for chumps. They know what they want, are clever about taking it, and work hard not to get caught. Cheating is as old as gaming, video or otherwise. And an online game universe is a big, tricky thing to make. When you have millions of people romping through your creation, they're going to do all kinds of crazy, unanticipated thingswhich can let them become tiny gods if left unchecked.

Duping

The oldest and often easiest of game exploits is duplicating items. It can be as simple as quickly dropping and picking up an item over and over until it doubles. Even the rumor of easy loot is enough to send players off on strange, pointless errands. In World of Warcraft, for instance, most duping tricks involve trading gold or items to another player and then getting your character rolled back to the state it was at before the trade, sometimes by making a character with an inappropriate name and deliberately having it reported, for example. Any gamemaster (GM) who catches you duping is going to kick your butt.

Pathfinding

MMOGs are all about hitting monsters until they die from it. Many players discover, however, that exploits are available when you're running around instead of going toe-to-toe with a critter. Monsters like either to make a beeline for a threat or to follow invisible trails laid down by the designers. One classic example of pathfinding is players leading EverQuest's dragons out onto bridges, then slipping away to blast them with spells from below. The problem with this and other variants is that not only is it sometimes unclear to players that pathfinding is wrong, but GMs with hair-trigger tempers love to ban people for it.

Powerleveling

The most prevalent example of pathfinding right now is taking advantage of the mentoring system in games such as EverQuest 2 and City of Heroes. Mentoring and sidekicking artificially adjust a character's level to one closer to that of the rest of a group, letting friends of disparate levels venture out together. Powerleveling is great stuff, but it's not without its faults. In EQ2 it's possible to lower your average level when zoning into a particular area, then unmentor inside to create a spot whose mobs are scaled to an improper group average.

Macros

MMOGs can be pretty tedious. Clicking the same thing over and over again can be done just as well by a script as by handso naturally, people make scripts. Some actually go so far as to implement scripts for killing monsters, collecting loot, and even schlepping it back to vendors. Whether or not this is an officially butt-kickable offense depends on the game. Some games, such as Star Wars Galaxies and the original Asheron's Call, actually condone it, but others place it above all other evils.

Hacking

Hacks are an entirely different class of nastiness. Rather than taking advantage of something broken in the game, hacks break things themselves. Whether they're available depends mostly on how much is handled in the game's client rather than on its servers, which are infinitely harder to monkey with.

On one end of the spectrum are games like the original Diablo, which stored all of its character data on the client side. Diablo was so easy to mess with that it ended up becoming the most hacked game in history. On the other end, most modern games are comparatively ironclad. World of Warcraft is an exception, however. Character position is determined on the client, making it possible for players to fiddle with positional data and be instantly transported within the zone.

There are many reasons players cheat, most of them not very nice. There's the thrill of putting one over on someone, be it game designers or other players. There's the lure of free items, levels, and status. For the really unscrupulous, there's easy money to be made selling ill-gotten items, cash, and characters.

If you're on that side of the gaming fence, we hope you get caught. Jerk.

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